Schubert's song cycles prove that you don't always need to go to spend millions on opera productions to generate vivid music drama.

Baritone Roderick Williams was last seen in Nottingham on stage as Britten's tragic hero Billy Budd. At Lakeside on Thursday he had to bring alive both the external world and interior emotions of Schubert's song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin .

No props, no costumes, no sets. Just voice, piano - and the talent to infuse the texts and music with musical and imaginative energy. And all twenty songs were sung from memory.

As one of the UK's best opera singers, Roderick Williams knows how to sing with his eyes as well as his voice. He and his pianist Iain Burnside also know how to fuse the pervasive mill-wheel and babbling brook rhythms with the pulsating heart of the infatuated young man whose love for the pretty miller's daughter is sadly unrequited.

And just as the mill-stream is in a constant state of flux, so are the would-be lover's emotions.

Williams captured this shifting tone with impressive insight and consistent beauty of tone. In the same way that all the best pictures are on the radio, the images projected were always razor-sharp and conjured up the rival forces which claim the young man: both the miller's daughter and the stream in which he ends his life.

It's relatively rare to hear the work sung by a baritone rather than a tenor, for whom Schubert wrote the song cycle. But Roderick Williams has a voice and a physical presence which covers an unusually wide range: boyish at the outset, then much darker as unease and foreboding set in.

In his introduction Williams spoke of the performance as work in progress. He and Iain Burnside certainly made their performance vibrant with a sense of fresh discovery.